The Things We Learn When Young
By W. F. Twyman, Jr.
My wife has left for her book group this evening. I am watching more AI gloom and doom on You Tube. What Happens When Millions of AIs Must Profit or Die As I was reading my old e-mails, I came across an idea about misplaced idealism in public figures. I was reminded of a story from my young days in Washington. D.C.
It was the late 1980s/early 1990s. I was working on Capitol Hill for Congressman Barney Frank and my wife was working for Congressman Major Owens, a congressman from Brooklyn. Our social circle was intimate and insular, the black Harvard/Yale crowd in our nation’s capital city. Anthony Williams, HLS Class of 1987, was not yet Mayor of D.C. I once run into Glenn Ivy, HLS Class of 1986, and Odeana Neal, HLS Class of 1986, for lunch in the Rayburn cafeteria for lunch. Another friend was a running buddy from HLS. His girlfriend was Harvard undergraduate. And my girlfriend (now wife) was a recent graduate of Yale.
There was this wonderful, quirky and smart young woman in our circle. She struck me as an idealist and shouldn’t we all be so in our mid-twenties? Anyway, I learned she worked for one of the top names in the social justice, non-profit world. Let’s just say her boss appeared as one of the top 100 influential Americans in some Time magazine listing. This was a long time ago.
What I found memorable was not that an idealist young woman cast her career with a leading advocate for social justice. What I always remembered was the disappointment in my friend’s voice. Her boss was a dreadful person in the office. She was not pleasant. The boss treated people shabbily. There was little connection between her glowing public face and how subordinates navigated the office far from the media glare.
It was an important lesson for my friend, and me too. While in school, I just presumed a crusader for good in the public square would be a nice person behind closed doors. This was my fallacy of youth. My friend grew up that summer in D.C., and for the better. A Harvard/Yale pedigree is no guarantee of a good heart and a sensitive soul. Lessons of our youth.
In the real world, some adults with big names wore masks in public. At least my young friend knew she was never in the presence of masked characters when with my girlfriend and me in the buppie domains of Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle. We wore no masks over Ethiopian food and coffee shops near the Red Line. If you are reading this essay our friend, those were the best days of our lives.
We love you as our hair grows gray, our hearing fades, and our memories age like fine wine.